Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain.…
Blockchains and other public ledger structures promise a new way to create globally consistent event logs and other records. We make use of this consistency property to detect and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks in a key exchange such as…
We improve the fundamental security threshold of eventual consensus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain protocols under the longest-chain rule by showing, for the first time, the positive effect of rounds with concurrent honest leaders. Current…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
Within a modern democratic nation, elections play a significant role in the nation's functioning. However, with the existing infrastructure for conducting elections using Electronic Voting Systems (EVMs), many loopholes exist, which…
Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, remains a structural threat to blockchain fairness because a block producer can often observe pending transactions and unilaterally decide their ordering or inclusion. Existing mitigations hide transaction…
Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts - programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of…
Ethereum Smart contracts use blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. These programs are deployed on decentralized applications running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people to…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Blockchain technology offers a promising foundation for modernizing E-Voting systems by enhancing transparency, decentralization, and security. Yet, real-world adoption remains limited due to persistent challenges such as scalability…
Ethereum's transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool…
Electing democratic representatives via voting has been a common mechanism since the 17th century. However, these mechanisms raise concerns about fairness, privacy, vote concealment, fair calculations of tally, and proxies voting on their…
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay,…
Decentralized data-feed systems enable blockchain-based smart contracts to access off-chain information by aggregating values from multiple oracles. To improve accuracy, these systems typically use an aggregation function, such as majority…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
Identifying reputable Ethereum projects remains a critical challenge within the expanding blockchain ecosystem. The ability to distinguish between legitimate initiatives and potentially fraudulent schemes is non-trivial. This work presents…
Ethereum's Gas mechanism attempts to set transaction fees in accordance with the computational cost of transaction execution: a cost borne by default by every node on the network to ensure correct smart contract execution. Gas encourages…